MTF-Net: Multi-Modal Temporal Feature Fusion Network for Pedestrian Intention Prediction

RESUMO

Accurately predicting pedestrian intentions is crucial for ensuring safe and proactive interaction between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians. However, existing approaches often depend on architectures that either model temporal dependencies within individual modalities or fuse modalities only at coarse semantic levels. To address these limitations, we propose MTF-Net, a novel Multi-Modal Temporal Feature Fusion Network that jointly models kinematic, appearance, and contextual cues for pedestrian intention prediction. MTF-Net integrates four complementary modalities-bounding-box dynamics, human pose keypoints, local context, and scene-level semantics within a recurrent fusion framework enhanced by gated linear units (GLUs). These GLU-based modules adaptively regulate cross-modal information flow, enabling interpretable and efficient feature interaction across temporal scales. Through three dedicated temporal encoding branches and an attention-guided fusion head, the proposed model robustly anticipates pedestrian crossing intentions several frames before they occur. Extensive evaluations on the PIE and JAAD benchmarks demonstrate that MTF-Net surpasses recent transformer- and graph-based models, achieving up to 0.95 AUC on PIE and 0.94 AUC on JAAD, while maintaining real-time performance. The results highlight that reliable pedestrian intention prediction arises from principled multi-modal fusion rather than excessive architectural complexity.